#time gate comic

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"My brother in christ, I saved them from a long excruciating embarrassing death from sepsis at 22, they're lucky they even made it to 18"

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Guest covers and fanart throughout the years~

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some funnies to salvage my day (i'm having a back pain flare-up please send help-)

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oh no i'm starting to put my blorbo's together-

they weren't meant to co-exist and yet here we are

let's face it, these two would be thick as thieves LMAO

(persephone from LORE | REKINDLED x uzuki from time gate)

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How did you accidentally kill Betty White😭

OH BOY DO I HAVE A STORY FOR YOUUU

(Time Gate: Reaper spoilers ahead! Go binge the comic if you don't want to be spoiled before reading this post LMAO)

so YEARS ago, before rekindled was even a twinkle in my eye, I started my main series project, beginning with Time Gate: Reaper. The main plot point? Girl meets guy, guy meets girl, guy tells girl he can mark people's remaining lifespans on his skin, girl finds out he has the timer for her future death written on him.

So the whoooole time, he's not telling her when it's gonna happen, and he's also not telling her that her timer is the exact same as his (so they're doomed to die at the same time).

A few chapters before the series ended, he FINALLY reveals when she's going to die (in like, two days), but then she asks him about the timer on his back (which is his timer):

And she KNOWS he's lying about it but she doesn't press him on the matter.

When the timers finally end, they die at the hands of Springlock (a time travelling scythe murderer). This was the final chapter of Time Gate: Reaper, after 7 years of work, 2000+ pages, and 104 chapters spread out over 11 volumes.

And when did that final chapter originally release?

December 31st, 2021.

GUESS WHO DIED APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 30 MINUTES LATER?

I know it was all just a coincidence, but I can't help but feel like it was all just a big cosmic joke of finally finishing a webcomic - with a central theme of death - not even two hours before the death of a beloved celebrity who was so old and undying there were memes about it. I can't help but think despite being the creator of the comic, all-knowing of the story's plot, Mitsuhiro managed to lie to me as well about who that timer really belonged to 😭

Rest in Peace Betty White, big sorry about that :'0

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i'm going to spoil a little bit of time gate but TRUST me, there's a reason for it

so there's this bit in one of the later books where one of our former main protagonists explains the concept of meta jumping through timelines

essentially, it's to answer the question, "can you keep jumping after a jump?"

and ofc the answer is, well, yes

but it comes with drawbacks

and he goes on to explain those drawbacks with a chessboard

the concept being that, if you (represented by the king or queen or whatever piece you so choose) jump to another chessboard in a similar or otherwise the same state as your ongoing game, you can have multiple outcomes play out

but if you want to go back to your original timeline, pre-jump, that will become more difficult the more meta jumps you've done, as your original timeline is left further and further behind

in this case, your original timeline is that original chess game, and the more you meta jump, the more your pathway back becomes more obfuscated and confused and you risk being detached from your original timeline forever

so anyways

i'm saying all this

because 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel exists now

and on the one hand, i'm screaming as i think about hale trying to explain exactly what the game is doing

but i'm also heaving a sigh of relief because omg my chess analogy wasn't stupid ??? it's literally the PERFECT analogy to explain quantum physics and time travel and i'm just

i'm not some PhD student in quantum physics or anything y'all

i'm just failing upwards JFKLDSAFJDLKSFJKALS

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a shapeshifting time traveler and his apprentice who works as a minimum wage barista get pissed because their perfect speedrun keeps getting ruined by two teenagers with a kill count

they're about to run attempt 9999 and the barista is terrified that his boss is about to end up in some Y2K situation

the time traveler is very old and really does not care for the pop culture references from his apprentice whose strongest skill is creating latte art

they don't even get the bragging rights of being the main characters but still have to do the job of the main characters because the actual main characters are too involved in their love/hate relationship to be any good at saving the world

this is time gate.

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OKAY BUT HONESTLY I've been kind of stressing over making this post not because I didn't want to follow through on that poll I hosted, but also just because like... it's original work! And it's original work that I've been doing for over a decade in relative obscurity. So it's a little nerve-wracking to be like "Hey guys! Go read this comic that I started drawing nearly a decade ago! It really shows!" especially when I'm doing it from an alt account (i.e. this one) that people know me for being relatively confident on. It's like being that "one kid" in show & tell with their Pokemon cards all over again 🤣 I kept trying to come up with some kind of post that would "justify" me posting about it all, but nothing felt "good enough" so I finally went back to this draft about Springlock and decided to use that as the icebreaker. It's now or never.

Time Gate is a dark fantasy series I've been working on since about 2007/2008ish. It's existed on the Internet in multiple forms, starting as a Zelda fanfic online in 2009 and then dropping all the Zelda stuff and turning into an original comic series in 2014. Since then its first installment, Reaper, finished in 2021, two hours before the 'untimely' death of Betty White that totally wasn't the fault of my main character who can predict people's deaths. Reaper's completed narration of the beginning of [loop: 9998] clocks in at over 2,000 pages.

Now I'm working on Time Gate: [AFTERBIRTH] which is a direct continuation of Reaper and is drawn in the more vertical webtoon style. Yes, the choice of title is intentional, funnily enough the episode featuring my main character bursting out of a tub of her own blood and bodily fluids only got removed by Webtoons for having "too much boob curve". So I covered it up with more blood and that got Webtoons' seal of approval. Webtoons is... weird.

This series is a love letter to all those "weird kids" who grew up wondering why they got dopamine rushes off of arguments and fights or getting in over their heads trying to grow up too fast. It's a love letter to the people who love hyper-analyzing convoluted and way-too-long narratives with overpowered characters who could only exist within the limitless bounds of the imagination.

But most of all, it's a love letter to the part of me that still adores dumb over-the-top weeb shit.

That being said, this piece of work is not intended to provide comfort, but rather, catharsis. Don't read it looking for any kind of guidance on life or interpersonal relationships. Its story and its characters are only concerned with what comes after - when the lights have gone out and the hourglass has run empty.

This series contains blood/gore and fantasy violence, and depicts adult topics such as post-traumatic stress disorder through a fictional lens. It is not intended for anyone under the age of 18+.

I have a dedicated Time Gate blog, so you might see some reblogs here every now and then as I start to use it more (though I'm currently resting through a hiatus, LORE | REKINDLED came around at the perfect time for me to have something new to work on).

As you may have guessed, with Reaper originally launching in 2014 (when I was literally 18) the comic has... not aged gracefully, at least in my opinion, and could use some reworking, at least the first few volumes (I'm still pretty happy with the stuff that came out around the 2019-2021 mark after I took a nearly 2 year hiatus).

Of course, I can't stop y'all from looking it up and reading it (the original version will still be canon even if it's aged so help yourself) but just know there's a dedicated redraw and rewrite on the way <3

And if it's not your cup of tea, that's fine! It's a completely different story with different goals from Rekindled. The main characters aren't saints and they're in a relationship I definitely wouldn't recommend anyone be in LMAO

That being said, don't be surprised if you hear the subtle heartbeat of Time Gate underneath the floorboards of Rekindled~

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this panel is from like last year but in the wake of grimace's birthday i like to think the reason springlock doesn't allow matty to bring his lattes back in time with him is because one time springlock brought a grimace shake with him during a jump and accidentally left it behind and uzuki and mitsuhiro tasted it and that became one of their death loops